Devangshu Datta: Looking good in comparison

Behavioural scientists chuckle over the “Lake Wobegon Effect”. Lake Wobegon is a fictional small town whose residents claim that all the women are beautiful, all the men strong, and all the children intelligent. Similar effects are seen in surveys where everyone is a self-assessed good driver.

Averages being moveable benchmarks have a bearing on metrics like Quality of Service (QoS) and Customer Satisfaction (CS). If the average QoS in a given industry is low, customer expectations are also low and CS may be misleading.

A good example is the US airlines industry. Musician Dave Carroll spent a year trying to get United Airlines to pay for $800 worth of damage to his Taylor guitar, which was chucked onto the tarmac by baggage-handlers. In disgust, he gave up and wrote an anthem to consumer (dis)satisfaction.

United Breaks Guitars has generated 6 million views and 25,000 comments on Youtube. United was embarrassed, while Carroll received ample compensation from i-Tunes downloads. The comments make it clear that many US flyers are unhappy. But United doesn’t rank very low on the CS totem-pole because the average US airlines’ QoS is poor.

The scenario is similar in Indian telecom. Decades of appalling monopoly set negative benchmarks. This legacy influences expectations. Undoubtedly, QoS has improved and costs have dropped dramatically. But average QoS is way below acceptable.

Willy-nilly, I’m an expert on telecom customer service. I maintain two establishments in Delhi and Kolkata, and travel a lot. Hence, I possess three DSL broadband connections from BSNL, MTNL and Airtel. I also use a Reliance mobile broadband (BB) connection, a postpaid mobile (GSM-EDGE) from Airtel as well as prepaid lifetimers from BSNL and Vodafone.

This sounds like overkill and it’s a nightmare to track bills. But at any given time, something is out of commission. Many of my friends have similar profiles, picking up tabs for wire-lines in two establishments. On domestic flights, every passenger puts two cellphones through the X-ray.

In the North East, or in rural Bengal, BSNL has the best GSM coverage but poor data plans. Ditto for Vodafone in Maharastra (ex-Mumbai) and Goa. The Reliance BB-CDMA card is to cover that gap in plans.

In Kolkata, the BSNL BB is often down for days. Here, Airtel’s EDGE and Reliance’s BB come into play. MTNL Delhi is better than BSNL Kolkata at restoring voice services quickly. But a malfunctioning router or adapter, or server-side problem stopping Net access takes weeks.

Hence, the Airtel BB in Delhi, to cover for MTNL’s poor QoS. Airtel has decent QoS. But it once took over 10 requests and three weeks to shift the physical location of my DSL connection by some 250 metres. I’ve never quite trusted it since.

Reliance Communications asked me to submit the same documentation three times and suspended my connection for two weeks. The customer service guys informed me that RCom has no internal means of communicating with its own Web World outlets. This struck me as truly remarkable but I had to trek to the same place I bought the device to re-submit photocopies after they lost two sets(!).

One would have thought it made sense to pamper high-end customers. But none of the telecom firms have the equivalent of Frequent Flyers Programmes, or banking services aimed at HNIs. It would be simple to filter out high-revenue customers and offer better personalised QoS. That may help build loyalty, and prevent churn, once number portability occurs.

Lake Wobegon notwithstanding, I’m average in terms of high-end customers. As things stand, no service provider gets more than about 35 per cent of my total revenues. If any of them offered better end-to-end QoS, it could triple its yield from me and, by inference, my customer segment at the least.